Software Testing Unleashed - QA, DevEx & Quality Engineering

With Sebastian Malyska I talk about what sits behind the APIs testers often take for granted. We get into why REST is still on top but not the whole story, how GraphQL and webhooks fit into the picture, and what actually happens when an AI agent talks to a real system through MCP. There is a practical argument running through all of it: if you understand the protocol layer, you can make smarter decisions about where to test, how to structure automation, and how to avoid burning unnecessary tokens and budget. Sebastian also makes the case that front-end testers are already closer to this world than they think, and that the next step in the career is simply to look one layer down.

With Klaudia Dussa Zieger I talk about where language models actually deliver in testing and where they fall flat. We get into the concrete details: why a small function like generating keyword documentation works so well with a standard chat model, why reviews only started working once they switched to a reasoning model, and why one engineer working on embedded legacy code said no to AI help without hesitation. Klaudia also shares the translation use case I found most vivid, turning a cryptic technical defect message into something a domain tester can actually read.

With Jean-Francois Riverin I get into a question that bothered him for over 20 years: why are there still bugs in production even when you tested as well as you possibly could? His answer is that software stopped being a complicated problem, like building a bridge, a long time ago. It is now complex, more like medicine or meteorology, and that means the whole idea of finding the right answer through testing is the wrong goal. We talk about what it looks like to switch that mindset, what "safe to fail" means in practice, and how to make that argument to a manager who still expects predictable budgets and zero surprises on Friday afternoons.

Why do so many software teams end up with the exact architecture they never intended to build? With Vanessa Formicola I talk about the hidden forces that shape technical decisions, and why those forces have far less to do with technology than most engineers want to admit. We get into patterns she calls the kitchen sink, Cirque de Soleil coding, and the monolith constellation, each one a recognizable trap that grows from career incentives, delivery pressure, and organizational culture rather than bad technical judgment. I keep coming back to her concept of holistic engineering, which asks us to treat an organization as a living system and factor in product direction, people's actual lives, and structural dynamics when making architectural choices.

With Kari Kakkonen I talk about what happens when you explain software testing through a fantasy story for children, where dragons are defects and knights are testers. We get into how the analogy grew into a full world covering functional, performance, usability, and security defects, each mapped to a chapter with its own kind of dragon. Kari describes how he tested the book iteratively with children, teachers, testing professionals, and non-IT readers across four rounds, and how a twelve-year-old at a book fair said she wanted testing as a profession after flipping through it. We also touch on the donation campaign that brought the book into schools across Finland and beyond, and what a possible second volume might cover, from testing techniques to automation and AI. One detail I keep coming back to: not every analogy in the book is spelled out, and the black dragon is left without explanation on purpose.